1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a method and apparatus for an interactive voice response system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A telephone can be used to place a catalogue order; check an airline schedule; query a price; review an account balance; notify a customer; record and retrieve a message; and many other business interactions. Often, each telephone call involves a service representative talking to a user, asking questions, entering responses into a computer, and reading information to the user from a terminal screen. This process can be automated by substituting an interactive voice response system (IVR) with an ability to play voice prompts and receive user input e.g. from speech recognition or from DTMF tones.
The interaction of the voice prompts and user input is guided by a voice application that in turn is executed by the IVR. Voice applications have been written in script, state code, Java™, and voice extensible mark up language (VoiceXML). Java™ and all Java™ based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc in the United States, other countries or both.
When a known user speaks correctly, clearly and in a good quiet environment, an IVR speech recognition engine trained in the speech of the user has little problem understanding the speech utterances. However, if the speech differs too much from the data that was used to train the speech recognition engine then understanding the speech can be difficult. When the system cannot correctly recognize an utterance it is usual for the engine to prompt the user to repeat the utterance. However, if the user is unaware of how to help the IVR he can compound the problem. For instance it may be that the user is speaking too slowly in the first place and speaking even more slowly will compound the problem. This is because it is human nature to speak louder, slower or in an over pronounced way when not initially understood. This can often be heard when a tourist abroad tries to speak, in their native tongue, to a foreigner. This may help when speaking to a human but usually has the opposite effect when speaking to a machine.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,314,396 discloses a system for automatic gain adjustment in a speech recognition system and returns a signal to noise ratio to a user with the intention of achieving a better speech recognition accuracy.
Therefore, although it is known to give feedback to a user as to the signal to noise ratio, no-one has disclosed feedback concerning the speed at which a user is speaking.